What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2016

The Year: 2016
What the Nominees Were: Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: 20th Century Women was pretty great. Two movies that were nominated for Animated Feature that could have gotten Picture nominations are Moana and Zootopia.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Moonlight
How Hard Was the Decision: I do love Arrival, but Moonlight is a very worthy winner.

Director: Barry Jenkins
Writer: Jenkins, based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.”
Stars: Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali

The Story: We follow the life history of Chiron at three different points: First as a little kid in a poor Miami neighborhood, scared into silence, who is helped by a local drug dealer named Juan. Then we meet him as a teenager, discovering his homosexuality and getting in trouble with the law, and finally as an adult, dealing drugs and trying to reconnect with his first love.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Supporting Actor for Ali and Adapted Screenplay. It lost Director, Supporting Actress for Harris, Cinematography, Editing and Score.
How It Won: It didn’t at first! Nobody was that surprised when Warren Beatty falsely announced (because of an envelope switch) that La La Land had won. The producers of that movie got through their speeches before anybody realized that a mistake had been made and the Moonlight filmmakers were belatedly called up to give their own speeches. Indeed, Hollywood loves itself and La La Land seemed like a shoo-in, but Moonlight was just so damn good that it overcame the Academy’s aversion to Black and gay stories.

Why It Won:

1. The world will talk at a hero, but one of the strongest reactions that hero can have is silence. We see how little Chiron’s silence isolates him, but also how it elicits both frustration and sympathy from those who try to reach him. Every time he refuses to respond, he asserts his power over the speaker more profoundly than he could by speaking, and becomes a more compelling character. It feels very counterintuitive to write dialogue in which there’s no dialogue, but it can be just as compelling as a two-sided conversation.
   
2. Ideally this would have been shot like Boyhood over the course of 15 years, so we could have seen one actor at all three ages, but they didn’t have that luxury. Luckily the three actors that play Chiron at different ages work really well together. It’s to Jenkins’ credit that it’s entirely convincing that they’re all three playing the same character (though he has changed so much that the three are playing quite different people.)
   
3. Jenkins and McCraney met through this project and discovered that they grew up in Miami within blocks of each other and had very similar childhoods (both similar to Chiron’s). Interestingly, the play intercut the stories of the three Chirons at different ages, and it was a twist that they were all the same character. I think playing the story chronologically in the film was a good call.
4. This was the second lowest-grossing Oscar winner (behind, surprisingly, The Hurt Locker) with makes it all the more remarkable that it pulled off the win. It’s frankly astonishing that the Academy recognized a story of gay Black manhood. Keep in mind that I’ve given Oscars to Brokeback Mountain and Milk, but the Academy did not, so it was amazing that this was the one that finally broke through. It’s a testament to the simple universal power of the story.
   
5. As you can tell from the Oscar win, Mahershala Ali dominates the movie, despite very little screen time. The scene where he teaches Chiron how to swim, with the camera dipping into and out of the water line, is literally and figuratively buoyant, keeping a very heavy story afloat. Tiny moments of transcendence from a bleak life come to define Chiron’s story.
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2015

The Year: 2015
What the Nominees Were: The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Room, Spotlight
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: I got nothing. It was a weak year.

What Did Win: Spotlight
How It’s Aged: It’s fine. A respectful treatment of a worthy topic. But it feels like a TV-movie, if that identification still means anything. An episode of “Law and Order” from 20 years earlier covered the same topic with more bite.

What Should’ve Won: Mad Max: Fury Road
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard, because there were no shoo-in candidates this year (if only I could move Selma by a year!) Normally, I would say that this movie would have no chance at Best Picture, but it did get a Picture nomination and a boatload of wins in other categories, so I’ll declare that it was possible.

Director: George Miller
Writers: Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris
Stars: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne

The Story: In a post-apocalyptic hellscape, drifter Mad Max gets kidnapped and turned into a hood-ornament. He fights his way free and joins Furiosa, a war leader who has rebelled in an attempt to rescue the evil leader’s five wives. They all chase each other back and forth across the desert.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Costume Design, Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Production Design, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. It lost Picture, Director, Cinematography and Visual Effects.
Why It Didn’t Win: Clearly the Academy loved this movie, but it was just too unthinkable to give a slam-bang gonzo movie like this the big award. Spotlight was a worthy topic, so it eked out a win despite being rather forgettable.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is probably the most exciting action movie ever made. I exercise to movies on my elliptical runner and I never need much convincing to throw this one on for another five spectacular workouts. And yet, the movie could not be more emotionally satisfying (more so than Raiders, the only other action movie on my list.) It’s an adrenaline-fest that also doubles as a feminist manifesto.
   
2. Charlize Theron’s astonishing performance dominates the movie, but can we talk about how great Nicholas Hoult always is? He almost steals the movie as a goon-turned-good. (As I write this, he’s up for the role of James Bond, which would be shocking casting, but I think he could pull it off.)
   
3. Legendary comic book artist Brendan McCarthy (Judge Dredd, Zenith) is credited as a co-screenwriter because he helped make 3500 storyboards that essentially served as the movie’s screenplay. This is not remembered as a “comic book movie”, but it is, more literally than most. The result is a kind of visually kinetic storytelling that most action movies only dream of.
   
4. Often you watch a movie like this and say, “this movie is awesome because it feels really gnarly and like all of these people making the film are putting themselves in danger,” and then you find out afterwards that someone actually died during filming it and you feel awful. But thankfully that’s not the case here. Amazingly, though the danger was very real, things seem to have been run entirely safely, so you can enjoy it as much as you want. (They do get you to worry at one point in the doc that someone has been killed, but it turns out it was just a dummy that got its head sheared off.) This is all the more astonishing because the movie clearly uses very little CGI and staged all the stunts practically (They basically just used CGI to digitally remove all the safety harnesses)
5. All four Mad Max movies are well worth watching, but there are various reasons that none of the previous three got close to the list. One is the undercurrent of homophobia in those movies. This movie kept the villains scary without the element of leather-man-panic that sours the others.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2014

The Year: 2014
What the Nominees Were: American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything, Whiplash
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Nightcrawler definitely deserved a nomination more than American Sniper and its notorious prop baby. I wouldn’t have minded The Babadook getting a nomination either.

What Did Win: Birdman
How It’s Aged: I love Birdman. I watched it again recently and it’s aged beautifully. I was worried the one-shot gimmick or the all-drum score would turn grating upon rewatch, but no, it’s delightful. It’s a favorite movie of mine. But it was nowhere near the best movie of 2014.

What Should’ve Won: Boyhood
How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice between Boyhood and Selma, two of the best movies of the 21st century. This is another year where I seriously considered declaring a tie, but decided I just couldn’t get away with it.

Writer and Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke

The Story: Shot over the course of 12 years, we follow Mason Evans from age 7 to age 18 as his mom goes through a series of alcoholic stepdads and his own father drifts in and out of his life. But that makes it sound more dramatic than it is. It’s largely about small moments.

Any Nominations or Wins: It only won Supporting Actress for Arquette. It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Hawke, Original Screenplay, and Editing.
Why It Didn’t Win: It’s pretty baffling. Everyone was shocked by the result that year. Birdman is great, but feels much less like a Best Picture than this (or Selma). Maybe chalk it up to actors liking movies about acting?

 
Why It Should Have Won:

1. My favorite moment in this film is when Mason (at maybe 13 or 14) is hanging out with some older kids in a house under construction, drinking beer for the first time and passing the time by throwing a saw blade over and over into a piece of drywall. Normally, we know how this goes: Someone is going to the hospital. But this isn’t that sort of movie. Everything turns out fine. This is a movie about the sort of things that boys do, not the most dramatic thing that could happen to them.
   
2. This movie confirms something I’d always said: Technical innovation doesn’t require technological innovation. This movie could have been made any time in the history of cinema by anyone who had the dedication. It was made on the cheap and on the fly, and yet it shatters all of our assumptions about what a film can and should be. Writer/Director Richard Linklater suddenly remembered, “Oh yeah, all this stuff we do, all these tried-and-true tricks we’ve built up over the years to cleverly simulate life on the screen, we don’t have to do it that way. If we want, we can jettison all that stuff and try something totally different. We can find a new way to powerfully capture the nature of life on screen.” And so he did.
   
3. But then he did something that was terrifyingly bold: he waited twelve years to let the rest of the world in on his flash of inspiration. He worked periodically on this movie while also making School of Rock, Before Sunset, Bad News Bears, Fast Food Nation, A Scanner Darkly, Me and Orson Welles, Bernie, and Before Midnight, never letting on that he also had this other movie brewing totally out of sight. Note also that none of the movies between Before Sunset and Before Midnight was much of a critical or commercial success, and there was a three year gap in there with no movies at all. Surely he must have felt at times that he was being written off and forgotten, and his last best hope was to simply declare Boyhood to be done and unleash its brilliance upon the world. But no, he would sell no wine before it was time, and he let it continue its slow fermentation, no matter what ups and downs his career might experience in the meantime. That is fierce dedication to art.
   
4. Mark this as another movie about the pain of making your kids move (repeatedly in this case.) Mason’s mom makes him paint over his own height markings on the wall, seemingly unaware that this will be a painful thing for him to do. Nothing could better illustrate losing your own history.
   
5. The movie’s most painful question is never asked nor answered, but hangs powerfully over everything. We can sense that Mason must desperately want to ask his father, why were you willing to stick around and raise my new stepbrother but you weren’t willing to stick around and raise me? It is to the movie’s credit that it can ask that implicitly without having to say it.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2013

The Year: 2013
What the Nominees Were: 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, The Wolf of Wall Street
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Spectacular Now was a great small movie, and I certainly wouldn’t mind if Frozen had gotten a nomination.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: 12 Years a Slave
How Hard Was the Decision: I love American Hustle, Gravity and Frozen, but c’mon, you can’t take away this win.

Director: Steve McQueen (not that Steve McQueen)
Writer: John Ridley, based on the memoir by Solomon Northup
Stars: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt

The Story: In 1841 a free Black man in New York is kidnapped and sold into slavery, eventually winding up on a Louisiana plantation for 12 years before he can finally get a letter to his wife and get free.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Supporting Actress for Nyong’o and Adapted Screenplay for Ridley. It lost Director, Actor, Supporting Actor for Fassbender, Costume Design, Editing and Production Design.
How It Won: Host Ellen Degeneres soured this movie’s win by joking earlier in the evening that if you didn’t vote for it, you were going to be accused of racism. I think it’s bogus to count that as a reason for this win, because we’ve seen no shortage of examples of years where that made no difference. I think this movie won despite its anti-racism, not because of it. It was just too good to deny.

Why It Won:

1. The fact of this movie’s existence (finally a movie about slavery written and directed by Black people) is so significant that one is hesitant to judge it at all, but that’s unfortunate, because it is a truly great film, beyond its significance. In McQueen’s previous films, he had shown a voyeuristic behavior towards suffering that had disturbed me, but it made him the perfect choice for this story. Given the centuries of romanticization and fetishization that have piled up to obscure and pervert our perception of slavery, the most important thing this movie had to do was simply to show the facts in the rawest, most matter-of-fact way possible: Show the casual nature of mothers being sold away from their children. Show the constant rape. Show the quotidian whippings in a way that lets us feel every lash. Just show it and let it lie, with no contextualization, no commentary, no distancing effects. That’s the main task, and Ridley and McQueen did it with startling power.
2. As a filmmaker, McQueen’s great strength has always come in the form of two gazes: the unblinking eye of his camera, and his ability to craft intense performances that can withstand that withering gaze. The amazing performances he’s assembled here are a testament to the power of that method. We must admire the courage of the white actors playing these fascinatingly evil characters (except producer Brad Pitt, who gave himself the nice guy role!) but even moreso Ejiofor and Nyong’o for taking on the responsibility of representing such a legacy of suffering in a fully human way.
   
3. The most brilliant thing about this movie, of course, was the choice of Mr. Northrop as its subject matter. One big problem with slavery stories is that the horror is so omnipresent that it threatens to become invisible. We know how horrific it is, but it’s hard to believe that they feel it in the same way, because they’ve never known anything else. Choosing someone who was kidnapped into slavery as an adult is such an elegant solution to that problem. This way, we know that he feels our same indignant revulsion a thousand-fold.
   
4. Let’s talk about the brilliant irony of the set-up. When you tell a story about slavery, there’s a risk that you will lack the irony you need to crate meaning. Irony requires chagrin, but there’s no chagrin in being a slave, there’s no self-recrimination…What is happening to you is so totally outside your control that you can’t possible reproach yourself about any part of it, and it’s so totally evil that you can’t have any conflicted feelings about it. But strong fictional characters usually benefit from having doubt, guilt and recriminations. We want characters to be proven wrong so they can correct their false statements of philosophy and false goals….but slaves are just way too unambiguously in the right. But as soon as I heard about this story, I thought “Ah-ha! That’s how you do a story about slavery!” For this one slave, the condition would be ironic, because he would be unable to keep from saying, “I don’t belong here, I’m not a real slave, I’m not like these others!”, but every time he thought that he would feel horribly guilty: After all, did anyone belong here? Are the others “real slaves” any more than he? This is bitter irony. This is self-recrimination. It’s a brilliant way to create the most meaningful possible character.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2012

The Year: 2012
What the Nominees Were: Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Les Miserables, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is a pretty master-ful. How on earth was it not even nominated??

What Did Win: Argo
How It’s Aged: It’s odd that people don’t cite this one more often as a great Oscar injustice. An entirely fictionalized “true story” with workman-like (not even nominated) direction—How did it win Picture? Hollywood just loves stories about Hollywood saving the day.

What Should’ve Won: Lincoln
How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice between Lincoln and The Master, because neither is a perfect film. Lincoln errs on the side of being too slick, pretty, and anodyne, while The Master errs on the side of being too bizarre, rough, and oddly paced. Rewatching Lincoln, I was once again offended by the ways Spielberg and Kushner have cleaned up Lincoln’s character to fit our modern version of liberalism. Lincoln genuinely thought most Black men should never be given the right to vote, but they try to gloss over that to make him an unambiguous hero. Goodwin’s fetishization of moderation (the book came out just as Obama took office and by all accounts had a big influence on him) is pernicious and leaks into the movie, which feels the need to throw Thaddeus Stevens, a much better person than Lincoln, under the bus to make Lincoln look better. So I’m torn about giving this movie an Oscar. But ultimately, The Master is just too odd, so I’ll reluctantly go with this one.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Tony Kushner, very loosely based on “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones (plus about two dozen not-yet-famous-faces in bit parts like Adam Driver.)

The Story: In January 1865, Abraham Lincoln must wrap up the Civil War and get the 13th Amendment passed before the southern states rejoin.

Any Nominations or Wins: It only won Actor and Production Design. It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Jones, Supporting Actress for Field, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Costume Design, Editing, Score and Sound Mixing. Whew, that was a long list!

Why It Didn’t Win: I truly have no idea. The Academy has always liked nominating Spielberg more than actually giving him awards (The Color Purple famously had eleven nominations and no wins) and these dangled carrots fit that bill. But to lose to Argo?? Pretty baffling.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Spielberg only hired Day-Lewis because the timing didn’t work out with Liam Neeson and that’s a bullet past the ear if there ever was one! The movie takes liberties with the character, but Day-Lewis could not be more authentic, according to all the reports we have: from Lincoln’s high reedy voice to his ability to command a room without shouting, to his prematurely aged appearance, Day-Lewis is simply uncanny.
   
2. The lesson of Lincoln, and Lincoln, is that the greatest weapon a president can have is the ability to disarm (and thereby defang) his adversaries, which Lincoln does with an endless stream of inappropriate (but pointed) back-woods humor. (This is a weapon that LBJ and GWB also wielded expertly, for good or ill). Kushner and Day-Lewis masterfully recreate Lincoln’s canny charade: folksy hick on the surface, quick-eyed political mongoose underneath.
3. A good movie, even a biopic, isn’t about a person, it’s about a person’s problem. Kushner famously started out by attempting to cover 1863-65, but he got through hundreds of pages without making it to 1864, so he started over. Then he tried to just cover the four months of 1865, which turned out to be 500 pages! (Somebody publish that version please!) Spielberg, to his infinite credit, got to page 100 and said, “Hey, that’s a movie right there, let’s just stop at the end of January.” This isn’t really a bio-pic: it’s just the story of one problem: the passing of the 13th Amendment in the House. Of course, in Kushner’s capable hands, that’s enough to give a compelling portrait of the man with the plan.
   
4. Spielberg and Kushner know full well that, on a moral level, the audience is going to identify more with Stevens, but they also have to stress how radical he seemed to be at the time, and why Lincoln regarded him as more of liability than an asset in the fight against slavery. They get a lot of storytelling power out of that irony, ultimately leading up to the big reveal that Stevens has a secret Black common-law wife, which makes everything he said seem all the more ironic in retrospect.
   
5. (The problem with claiming this is based on Goodwin’s book, when it manifestly is not, is that there is a lot of great material in the book that will now never get adapted! The real star of the book is Salmon Chase, an enormously complex character who deserves his own movie, but he gets not even a mention here, alas.)
6. Kushner went through his finished script with a copy of the Old English Dictionary to make sure every word he used already existed in 1865, and indeed the language feels very authentic, with lots of great words like “flubdubs” and “pettifogging.” (When I wrote my Alan Turing biopic, I got dinged for using the word “newbie.”)

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2011

The Year: 2011
What the Nominees Were: The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Bridesmaids is pretty great, as is Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Crazy Stupid Love is better than a lot of the nominees (Hugo?? Easily Scorsese’s worst film.)  Overseas, the Iranian movie A Separation was very powerful.  

What Did Win: The Artist
How It’s Aged: It’s still pretty adorable. A lovely little movie that would be totally forgotten if it hadn’t won Best Picture (and is still pretty forgotten at that.) Generally seen as one of the most undeserving wins, but if they had to pick one of those nominees, this one isn’t bad.

What Should’ve Won: Bridesmaids
How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice because A Separation didn’t seem like it could’ve won, so I was left with American movies, and there were no five-star American movies this year. Ultimately, this was the four-star movie I had the most affection for.

Director: Paul Feig
Writers: Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig
Stars: Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd

The Story: Annie Walker is a failed bakery-owner whose best friend Lillian is getting married to a man in another city. Annie is devastated, but agrees to be her maid of honor, only to find herself in competition with Lillian’s new friend, a brittle trophy wife named Helen. Annie’s whole life falls apart, but she attempts a new romance with a charming cop, and eventually makes friends with fellow bridesmaids Becca, Rita, and especially Megan, which gets her past her depression.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Original Screenplay and Supporting Actress for McCarthy, but won neither
Why It Didn’t Win: I would say it was a long shot because it was a comedy, but it was beat by a comedy that was French and silent, so that can’t be it! Generally speaking, based on the number of shockingly weak nominations, the Academy had just lost their damn minds this year.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Judd Apatow directed or produced a lot of comedies in this era, but this was the best of the bunch (and, surprisingly, the most profitable.) Feig and Apatow had worked together on the TV show “Freaks and Geeks”, and Feig proves the defter directorial touch of the two. Hilarious Apatovian moments such as the bodily-flued spewing dress-fitting scene are balanced out by moments of more genuine emotion.
   
2. We fall in love with Annie when she wakes up next to Jon Hamm, feels self-conscious, sneaks out of bed, does her hair and make up, then sneaks back into bed and pretends to wake up as he does. The character will be fairly downtrodden and hapless, but this one moment of clever resourcefulness is enough to convince us she will have what it takes to come out on top in the end.
   
3. Wiig and Rudolph were old “Saturday Night Live” castmates and develop a very convincing chemistry here as the sort of easygoing old friends that we all wish we had more of. When they put food in their teeth in the opening scene to crack each other up, we get the instant feeling that this is a real friendship, as indeed it was.
   
4. Robert Kirkman famously created “The Walking Dead” to explore what happens after most zombie movies end. Likewise, Bridesmaids shows what happens after most romantic comedies end. She’s already had the traditional happy ending: her boyfriend helped her start her own business doing what she loved to do! But what happens when the economy crashes, the bakery fails and the boyfriend leaves? (It always drives me nuts how many comedies end with “let’s start our own business,” as if that’s not usually a disastrous decision!) This movie does a great job dealing with the real life national pain of 2011.
5. It’s understandable that McCarthy got the only nomination from the cast, because she became the breakout star with her hilariously profane take on Megan. She would rise to the task of headlining her own movies based on the strength of this one, despite not looking like a traditional movie star.
   
   
   
   
   

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2010

The Year: 2010
What the Nominees Were: The Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter’s Bone
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: That’s a good list, but How to Train Your Dragon is also pretty great.

What Did Win: The King’s Speech

How It’s Aged: When people complain about stuffy, talky, stiff-upper-lip Best Pictures, this one is frequently singled out for derision, but it’s a perfectly fine movie. Just not a Best Picture.

What Should’ve Won: The Fighter
How Hard Was the Decision: The Black Swan, True Grit and How to Train Your Dragon are all brilliant, but I love The Fighter even more.

Director: David O. Russell
Writers: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, from a story by Keith Dorrington, Tamasy and Johnson
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo

The Story: The true story of welterweight boxer Mickey Ward from Lowell, Massachusetts, who foolishly puts his career in the hands of his crackhead older brother Dicky and short-sighted mother Alice. Only when Dicky goes to prison does Mickey, with the encouragement of a tough new girlfriend, decide to finally get serious about his career. But just when he gets his shot at the big time, Dicky gets out and insists on retaking control.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Supporting Actor for Bale and Supporting Actress for Leo. It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actress for Adams, Original Screenplay and Editing.
Why It Didn’t Win: Once again, we have the heavy hand of Harvey Weinstein to blame. Weinstein threw his then-still-considerable weight behind The King’s Speech and pushed it over the finish line, ahead of several more noteworthy contenders, including this one.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Bale is one of our best actors and took home a well-deserved statue here, but Adams lost out to her co-star Leo, which is a shame because she’s great playing completely against type (she gets to throw some punches herself!) As of this writing, Adams has still never won, despite being one of the best actresses of her generation.
   
2. Ward is famous today for the three knock-down, drag-out title fights he fought against Arturo Gatti. But you won’t see those here. The writers took a good look at his life, decided that the best story was Ward’s struggle with his own family, and then ruthlessly pared that story down to its essence. We begin when Ward finally becomes aware of that problem and we end when that problem is ultimately resolved. The Gatti fights came about because Ward had solved his problems outside the ring, so they have no place here.
3. Crack addiction! Police brutality! Bloodsport! This could have been a very turgid drama. Instead, against all odds, it’s absolutely hilarious at least half the time. These people don’t know they’re in a drama. And it’s only because of the comedy that the drama works. We would give up on these people ten minutes in if they weren’t so endearingly goofy.
   
4. How many chances do the mother and brother get to ruin everything before they finally get it right? We get to the point where they’ve totally rubbed us raw. The hair goes up on the back of our neck whenever they enter the room. Then they finally surprise us. That’s how to create expectations before you defy them at the last possible minute.
5. We start off pitying these fools for giving the crackhead in the family too many chances, but soon we start loving him too and we’re right there with them rooting for him, against our own instincts. The movie humbles us with a simple Christian moral: Never give up on anyone, no matter what.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2009

The Year: 2009
What the Nominees Were: The number of nominations went back up to ten, where it’s remained ever since. Avatar, The Blind Side, District Nine, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! is excellent. In the Loop from England deserved a nomination.

What Did Win: The Hurt Locker
How It’s Aged: It’s great that a movie by a woman director finally won Best Picture, but it’s sort of a joke that Kathryn Bigelow only won by making an all-male testosterone fest. This movie questioned what we were actually doing in Iraq in so quiet of a voice, that it could easily be mistaken for a recruiting poster.

What Should’ve Won: An Education
How Hard Was the Decision: Not that hard because I love this movie. I thought it would be nice to give it to a different movie, also directed by a woman, that actually dared to give speaking roles to women!

Director: Lone Scherfig

Writer: Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber

Stars: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson

The Story: In 1961 London, Oxford-obsessed 16 year old Jenny Mellor loses her interest in going to college as she gets seduced by a conman, getting a different type of “education.” When she realizes that he’s already married, she has to get her life back on track.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Actress and Adapted Screenplay
Why It Didn’t Win: Hollywood couldn’t resist pitting Bigelow against James Cameron, the ex-husband who cheated on her, making Hurt Locker and Avatar the only two real contenders. An Education got nominated but got lost in the new sea of ten nominees and forgotten.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. In the commentary, Sarsgaard points out a brilliant thing Scherfig does. In one scene, the whole point is that Jenny’s mom fails to speak up about the danger Jenny is putting herself in, so Scherfig subconsciously calls attention to that: “There’s an expectation created by the camera move that comes up later that the mother’s going to say one last thing, but she doesn’t. Like right here, in cinema language, she supposed to say one last thing right there.” A brilliant way to subtly dramatize something not happening.
   
2. The original memoir (really just a magazine piece) is well worth reading. There are so many things here that only could have come from real life because no one would make them up. Real sex is always so much weirder than movie sex, as shown here when David bizarrely wants to deflower Jenny with a banana.
3. I love how Hornby’s dialogue avoids the Sorkin Stammer. Jenny thinks highly of her own verbal abilities, and frequently tries to skewer whomever she’s talking to. In some scripts, her victims would just stammer helplessly because they had met a superior wit, but in this script, ever single person our hero tries to skewer whaps her right back (or at least has the wherewithal to say some version of, “It sucks that you’re talking to me that way.”) My favorite exchange: Jenny says to her headmistress, Emma Thompson, “I suppose you think I’m a ‘fallen woman.’” To which Thompson bats back, “Oh, you’re not a woman.”
   
4. Most deleted scenes are ultimately inconsequential, but here we have one that could not have been more important: Jenny’s only real confrontation with David after the truth comes out! But it was brilliant to cut it. The scene had way too much closure. What’s so great about the final onscreen ending is that it’s haunting. She never expunges the ghost of David, so he hovers over her whole life. She can pretend that it never happened, but she’ll always know better. Scherfig knew she had a brilliant script on her hands...but she also knew that the last page blew it, and a better one would make it a classic. She kept pushing until she found the bittersweet ending the movie needed. (Sarsgaard says the confrontation scene “never felt right in any way, shape or form.”)
5. Everything in this movie just swings. The clothes David buys her, the locations he takes her to, and especially the music playing there are delightfully hip. Who knew Mel Tormé could rock out? The country was waiting for the Beatles to wake them up (Jenny says “This whole stupid country is bored”) but, in some ways, it never looked cooler.
   
6. One thing I love about the movie is how low-stakes it is. Nobody ever pulls a gun. It’s just one girl’s education on the line, which is a hard way to make a movie, but refreshing. Sherfig says in the doc: “I was always taught that it doesn’t matter if a little girl’s dress is torn, or if 500 soldiers get killed on film, it’s a matter of which scale you weigh things on, and this film is hopefully as emotional as if something much more drastic had happened.”